On the face of it there is not a whole lot colleges can do in physical terms to prevent suicide. Tylenol, which is an extremely deadly drug in overdose is widely available everywhere, and then you can always throw yourself in front of a bus if you are not fussy about how you look at the funeral. So as long as you put a padlock on the cyanide, the germ warfare labs, and the water tower, you probably are doing enough to show that you are not wantonly negligent.

Clearly colleges need to strike a balance. Reasonable accommodations needs to be made for people with disabilities, if they request it, which is what the ADA calls for, but on the other hand you need to strongly discourage a culture of parasuicidal gestures, which is when people do things like cutting their arms (which is almost never deadly) repeatedly. Parasuicidal behavior is often very contagious, as anyone who works in a prison will tell you, and definitely needs to be sanctioned in some way if there is a pattern of behavior.

On the whole colleges it sounds like colleges are doing a pretty good job, and I suspect that young people in college probably have a lower suicide rater that those members of their age group who are not in college.

I'm one of the students who fell through the cracks.

After faltering twice into "easier" majors, after awkward rearrangements of social settings, and after diving head first into drug use, I attempted suicide when I was twenty, in 1993.

The city hospital I was taken to by friends didn't inform the school. My family didn't find out until they received an ER bill - and believed me when I told them I was getting treatment. My dorm, though, forced me to see a counselor at the student medical center: I met once with a graduate student(!) who asked me questions from a checklist, let me go, and didn't follow up to make sure I returned to any second appointment.

I stubbornly refused to get help, and that was that.

My university had a responsibility to make sure I got care, but the entire system failed me. Universities cannot bend over backwards enough to force suicidal students to receive treatment. Critics of such programs can bite me, because the alternative to acting is not only cruel, it's criminally negligent. And that's that.

Cyanide gets a lot press so maybe it shouldn't be in undergraduate labs (plus, undergrads are generally bad chemists and could kill themselves accidentally by producing the gas). But, as the previous letter writer said, any determined person is going to be able to kill themselves. Just about any other chemical in the lab will also kill you, maybe at higher doses than cyanide but still.

Tylenol, though, is a yucky way to go. Most people don't die quickly - they die slowly on the liver transplant list for months.

I have a real problem with counselors telling people who are suicidal that it is not their decision to kill themselves, that their suicide will only burden others. Even in suicide, the end of person's life, that person is made to feel like they are burdening others, that THEY are a burden. It reinforces, in a person who needs to feel loved, that they are worthless and only hurting others. Yes, a suicide does hurt other people, but someone who is suicidal needs to feel compassion from others, not belittlement.

In my mind I used to respond harshly to people I imagined would blame me: "I wouldn't want to burden you with my death, I'll be sure and clean the blood off the floor after I kill myself!"

There are two sorts of liability at issue here. Unfortunately, many of the schools seem to be focusing on the wrong one, their legal liability, when they should be paying attention to their moral liability.

Schools shouldn't be legally liable for student suicides. After all, college students are adults, with the rights and responsibilities of adults. While MIT's settling the Shin case seems to have made some schools nervous, they should look for their cues in the other cases where schools were not found liable.

Moral liability is another issue. Morally, we are bound to help others when we can, and schools who expel suicidal students over a fear of legal liability are violating their moral responsibility to help. Colleges are in a unique position to give help to their students, because of the array of resources available, and the intimate involvement they have with the lives of their students.

Schools who abdicate that moral responsibility to help ought to be held legally liable for the harm they cause.

Look here, Sliced and Diced. I'm sorry you didn't get enough help.

But colleges are not your parents. And it's not a hospital's responsibility to inform your school. What if it were a 40-year-old student? Or an employee of the university?

What if it were me? I certainly wouldn't want my private issues to be discussed with my employer or my school against my will. Either I survive or I won't. If I don't, I'll be glad I didn't contribute my defective genes to the human race.

You were 20 years old. Two years before that you became an adult - ready or not, that's the cut-off date by which you have to have gained some minimal level of competence. With adulthood comes great responsiblity to care for your own life, not an entitlement to a nanny state responsible for watching over you. I can understand if you were flatly refused help if you asked, but you yourself said that you "stubbornly refused to get help."

The role of universities is to provide an education, not to bend over backwards to force suicidal students to receive treatment. Personally, I wouldn't bend over backwards to force you to receive treatment. I highly honor and cherish our rights as human beings and as adults. That includes the solemn decision-making power to live our lives as we see fit, or die as we see fit, with as much dignity and privacy as we can muster.

If you feel you cannot handle the responsibilities and freedoms of adulthood, feel free to have yourself declared mentally incompetent and have someone take power of attorney over you. In that case, it would be up to whomever was in charge of you to watch over you just as your parents did before you turned 18.